What's your story?
February 10th 2008 00:12
"We all have at least one good story to tell."
-- Oprah Winfrey
-- Oprah Winfrey
The great O is right. Each one of us always has one good story worth sharing.
Could you share one right now? What's your story?
| 54 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Mal
Mal
I’d always planned to revisit my home town but you know how it is. Years tick by while you tick off all the failed New Year’s resolutions on your calendar, or in your diary, or private journal. Not that I own either or any of the above. It’s just an expression.
Next year I am definitely going to ask Mary Constance to marry me.
As a town, Nowhere Else was no stranger to evil or ‘weird shit’ as the locals called anything they couldn’t get their head around or didn’t want to know about or acknowledge – like the rampant incest in the area. Even the woman I knew as my own mother wouldn’t talk about it. The road sign at the edge of town always went missing. A town sign reading ‘Nowhere Else’ was always considered a major souvenir for both locals and tourists. (Those who didn’t get shot stealing it, that is).
As a child growing up at Nowhere Else, my interest in the unsolved disappearances of Bill, Bob, Ben, Brad, Beryl, Bronwyn, Brenda and Bonny Constance on the beach at Deadman’s Bay in 1970, right in front of their parents’ eyes was instrumental in my decision to study forensic science, and later join the police force.
It’s funny ‘peculiar’ how life turns out. And funny ‘ha ha’ to people with a warped sense of humour. As a kid I always wanted to be an inventor. I was obsessed with designing a toilet that could recycle human waste into edible and appetising meals and clear drinking water. At school, I used to study plumbing and architecture at lunch time in the library. I had visions of toilet pipes with filters leading into the back of the oven, up the legs of the kitchen table and the kitchen sink taps. I considered myself a modern-day da Vinci. I used to dream of never having to buy food or water again. (We only drank tap water and the local council used to charge you water bills). I used to think, ‘Just think. You’d only ever really have to eat one meal in your whole life.’ I realised it had to be balanced, and contain all the main food groups. It’s not like I didn’t study nutrition. You’d eat this one massive meal like a bulimic, then go to the toilet, but rather than throw your guts up, your own shit and urine would come out in an appetising meal and clear water form in your own kitchen. I dreamt of being rich, and famous as the person who solved the world’s starvation problems in third world countries. As long as some philanthropist would install toilets and kitchens in places like Africa. After building houses there.
When I was first asked to investigate the deaths of seven people who had all died within minutes of each other at Nowhere Else, I wondered what people in my home town who still remembered me would think of me coming back. Most of all, I wondered if Mary was still single. Maybe she had children. If so, I could only hope they were all to her father, and she wasn’t technically married to someone outside the family.
I’d read the brief on the first ‘death’. That of John ‘Shagger’ Constance – sheep farmer of 1 Dump Road Nowhere Else.
Before I go on, most of the people who live at Nowhere else are either related to the Constances or are Constances. Not everyone. Just most. For the record my name is John Constant.
On the night October 31, 2007, Shagger’s defacto, Sharon Constance, was dolled up in the way country girls who don’t watch TV doll themselves up, waiting at the farmhouse on Dump Road for her husband to come home so they could go to their regular Friday night wife-swapping party at the local council chambers. She had the spare car keys ready, for it was common practice to chuck the keys in the microwave in the tea room at these parties and then extract them like a lucky dip, and hope no stupid bastard turned the thing on while it had metal in it. Shagger was late. He had gone out to check the sheep for five minutes an hour ago.
Sharon wasn’t keen on going out to Deadman’s paddock as it was known among the local indigenous tribes (well, the two members who were left in the area and weren’t slaughtered out there, and were now locked up in the local psychiatric institution having studies done on the pigment of their skin, in order to prove a thesis that even if a half-cast abo stood on its head when it had a shit it would turn brown). As stated earlier, Nowhere else was no stranger to evil. It was one of those Australian country towns steeped in racism. I realise this doesn’t narrow it down much in order to pinpoint Nowhere Else’s exact location, but that’s beside the point. This story needs to be told as much as sheep need wool to keep themselves warm in winter.
The reason Sharon wasn’t keen on going out to the paddock was she was in her wife-swapping gear. But it was already 9pm and the keys were ‘nuked’ at 10pm on the dot at wife-swapping parties. If you weren’t there, you missed out, and had to go home with your regular partner.
Reluctantly, she drove out to Deadman’s paddock. From a distance she could see Shagger’s farm ute because its lights were on high beam. But no sign of Shagger. As she pulled up closer the dust was as thick in the headlights as Danoz Direct powder breaking free from a tacky applicator busting when you first try to use it. All she could make out was a mob of sheep surrounding a tree. They were running back and forth dementedly, jumping at something hanging from the tree. She called out to Shagger at least three times but there was no answer. “Shagger! Shagger! Shagger?”. She tried to shoo the sheep away without luck. Only once though. “Shoo,” she said. Conscious of getting her clothes dusty, and hurting her tonsils by repeating the word ‘Shoo’, she got back into the car and kept her hand on the horn while she drove towards the mob of sheep hoping they would scatter. They didn’t. She reversed back and drove at the sheep, still with her hand on the horn but faster in first gear. As she got closer it became obvious to her they had no intention of moving. She reversed back half a kilometre and was in third gear when she hit the mob of sheep.
Later, in an affidavit, Shazza described hitting two ewes like running into a brick wall. The sheep weren’t hurt but the front of the car was a complete write off. The insurance company didn’t cover hitting sheep so she later lost her rating. Not that she would have kept it anyway, for she wasn’t wearing her seat belt at the time, and went clear through the windscreen. Bloodied and bruised and cut, she forgot all about her appearance and clambered over the sheep.
And then she saw it. Hanging from the tree by a rope was Shagger’s erect penis, and scrotum. She didn’t have to look twice. She knew it was his. Later, numerous women in town were shown police photographs of his penis, and testified under oath that it was his. The sheep were jumping up and licking it. As sheep do.
Then something weird happened. Shazza wasn’t sure if the penis spoke to her or not but she clearly heard words uttered in Shagger’s voice. “This is all that’s left of me, Shaz,” she distinctly remembered hearing. She doesn’t know why but she began a conversation with the penis. “What’s going on?” she asked Shagger’s penis. “Remember how I told you once I used to have sex with sheep?” Shazza nodded. As she well would, having enjoyed watching this happen on numerous occasions. “Well, this is apparently my punishment for thinking with my dick, but I don’t know who is punishing me.” “Where’s the rest of you?” Shazza asked. “I don’t know. I think I’m all in here. I think the whole of me has been shrunk down into a dick.” Shazza fainted. As you would if you were in her clothes and shoes.
Shazza wasn’t discovered for almost a day. By the child of the neighbouring farmer. He ran and got his father. His father tried to shoot the sheep but it didn’t matter how many shotgun rounds he pumped into them, even from close range, none of them died. They just looked at him dumbly like sheep do. Sheep who wonder who is dumber. Sheep or humans? If they weren’t so intent on licking Shagger’s penis they would have taken the gun off the farmer, shot him, gutted him and had him for dinner as a way of getting animal revenge on humans.
The farmer ended up cutting the penis down, and taking it to the police station. After fighting the sheep off. Who weren’t very happy about it. Lucky he’d been a boxer when he was young and was able to punch most of the sheep out. He was a bit disturbed by the fact he couldn’t shoot them but could knock them out by punching them but didn’t think too much about it at the time. He was too concerned with saving Shagger’s penis.
For days, the sheep just hung around the police station until the penis was finally flown to the nearest city for forensic tests. Then, the sheep all disappeared and turned up in the city outside the forensic lab in a rental car.
DNA tests revealed the penis definitely belonged to Shagger but on further inspection they discovered it had a human skeleton and a heart. They tried to destroy it to get rid of the sheep but nothing they tried worked. They tried hanging it, electrocuting it, and killing it with lethal injections but nothing worked. The penis’s heartbeat just got a lot louder and faster. The chief forensic officer, gave up trying to kill it, and ended up feeding it to a ram. The ram ate the penis and then turned into a half-sheep half-human and ran off with the rest of the sheep following him.
I haven’t finished the story yet, but I thought this was probably enough.
Comment by What's Your Story?
What's Your Story?
So You're Getting Married